


icarus (immortality)

by girl0nfire



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers - All Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, I really wanted to crawl inside Movie!Tony's mind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-21
Updated: 2012-08-21
Packaged: 2017-11-12 14:02:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/491905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girl0nfire/pseuds/girl0nfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The suits are the only way Tony knows how to remember, and he never wants to forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	icarus (immortality)

**Author's Note:**

> _oh how wrong we were to think that immortality meant never dying_
> 
> \- Our Lady of Sorrows, MCR
> 
> Inspired by Richard Siken's poem [Editor](http://sporkpress.com/1_1/pieces/Editor.htm), which you should go and read NOW.

**history repeats itself (mark I)**

The very first thing Tony is aware of is the foreign weight settled on his chest; it’s cool and heavy, like someone set a stone square over his heart. A weight to hold down the struggling wings beating against his ribs. It hums like an old fluorescent bulb that needs to be replaced, and when he brings a hand to it, rough gauze brushes his palm and he thinks _at least something is holding me together_.

There’s a kind-looking man watching him, shaving in a cracked mirror, and for once Tony’s glad he doesn’t have an audience. Heaving himself up, everything comes to focus in sections, first the dirty cot he’d been lying on, then the dirt floor and rough-hewn stone walls, then the wires protruding from his chest. Tony slips his palm from his gauze-wrapped chest and smoothes his fingers along the wire until everything around him falls away again and his vision tunnels, the car battery the only thing he can see before everything tilts and blurs. The next thing he knows, his cheek is pressed to the gritty floor and the kind man is offering him a hand.

When he reaches for it, he finds his fingers shaking, and once he’s standing, he feels the bead of cold sweat that’s settled on his lip. He hears the kind man mutter something about _acute alcohol withdrawal_ but all Tony can think about is how badly he could use a drink, and he wonders vaguely if whiskey tastes different when you’re running on a battery. He tastes metal in his mouth and swallows thickly, bile and grief rising in his throat in equal measures.

Hours become days become weeks and soon time doesn’t matter anymore. Not that it ever really did, because when you’re Tony Stark, boy genius billionaire, money to burn and people lining up to strike the match, the only reason time would matter is if you didn’t have enough of it.

And Tony always did. Time to squander, time to sit bored out of his mind listening to a roomful of men old enough to be his father lecture him on things like budgets and production schedules and _responsibility_. Time to save worrying until tomorrow. And enough tomorrows to keep putting it off.

Here, in an endless blur of shouted demands in tongues he doesn’t understand and filthy water and short-sharp electric shocks that wake him up and exhaust him all at once, Tony thinks about all the time he’s wasted. All the time he’s watched slip by, minutes and hours he’s stubbed out like half-used cigarettes. 

So he does what Tony Stark does best, he creates himself some time. Digs through a pile of scraps and builds himself a heart. 

His hands don’t shake anymore. 

When he sees the faint glow of the arc reactor radiate from his chest for the first time, he wonders if this what people mean when they say that they see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Wrapping his hands around a bit of forge-warm metal, sweat beads on his forehead and he loses himself in the rhythm of the hammer. He’s got six pages of plans that together become one blueprint, a scribbled map that will lead them out of this hellhole. The kind man looks on, and Tony tries not to not to dwell on what he said.

_The man with everything and nothing_.

Suddenly, even Tony’s borrowed time has run out, and he suits up. The kind man, the man that saved his life, he’s rushing through the halls of their prison and Tony has to find him, has to catch him up and save him, too. The metal surrounding him whines as he moves, and the helmet obscures his vision but he can still hear the shouts. Tony finds him, of course he does, when it’s too late.

Because Tony Stark is _always_ too late.

The man, Yinsen, he reaches for Tony, lifts two fingers to his clockwork heart and whispers _don’t waste it_. His eyes fall closed, then, and Tony watches the last bit of color drain from his face, his hand falling away. Tony snaps the metal helmet back down, feeling the grief seeping through his veins, and wills the rage to overtake it. He clenches his fists inside the gauntlets, metal clanging against metal and he knows that it can’t. Tony knows that from now on his life will be thus – grief and rage battling together, cold and scalding in his blood.

_Don’t waste it._

And he won’t, he can’t. As he blasts the repulsors and rockets towards the sky, he hopes that one dead man’s hope is enough to stop him from falling.

**history throws its shadows over the beginning (mark II)**

Tony runs his fingers along the curves of the hologram in front of him, humming to himself and manipulating the suit’s outer shell. He removes the shoulder plates, replaces them with a set that can deploy flaps to stabilize flight, and then moves on to the helmet. Finally, here in his own lab, he can integrate his tech into a heads-up display – he needs to see where he’s going, what he’s doing.

By the time he’s finished the suit, and it’s fabricated into something almost usable, Tony is straining to suppress the tremble of his fingers as he adjusts the pieces of the armor. He tries not to blink, not to hesitate for a second, because in the dead-silent spaces between his breaths he understands what this means.

Instead, he straps on the suit before it’s even been tested and uploads JARVIS. “You have to run before you can walk,” he says, as much to himself as to the disapproving AI, as he launches himself skyward again, for the first time. Tony feels the chilling scald that starts in his chest, but the thrill of the dark sky above him stops it from registering and a grin splits his face. It’s the closest he’s ever been to free, made all the sweeter by the memory of the cuts still healing on his face, and even JARVIS’ warnings aren’t enough to stop him from trying to swim the Milky Way. Closing his eyes, he imagines he can feel the night sky surrounding him; the edges of the stars prickling his skin as he slips the bonds of earth and lets the cloudless black embrace him.

By the time the ice takes over and the HUD flickers dark, Tony realizes that this is the first time he hasn’t seen Yinsen’s face behind his eyes.


End file.
